Month: April 2018

One hundred years ago this week, Grace Kingsley chatted with D.W. Griffith about his plans for his next film, which was to be “another huge war drama”:

The new picture will present an entirely different angle, however, from that of Hearts of the World. For instance, it is not intended to have in it a single battle scene—it will merely use the world war as its background—and quite likely it will have a psychological aspect. But the fans need feel no fear at this announcement, since its outstanding feature will be a poignant love story.

As near as now known many of its scenes will be laid in France. But Mr. Griffith has three distinct stories under consideration for the first of his Artcraft releases following Hearts of the World, so that his next may be a blending of three plots. In fact, he is now rehearsing three plays at one and the same time, in an endeavor to pick out the most available material in each plot.

The settings for the three plays vary widely, with one opening in Canada, another in Hawaii, and the third with either England or Scotland as the background. George Seigmann, Griffith’s assistant, is having his troubles trying to provide the settings for the three different locations. He says he is only hoping that Griffith doesn’t finally decide on still another story with the location in Iceland!

Mr. Griffith said yesterday that perhaps before he gets through with the rehearsals he may take the meat of the three different plays and weave an entirely different fabric.*

It sounds like he was workshopping his script, the way modern directors like Mike Leigh do. The now-lost film was eventually called The Great Love. Nothing set in Hawaii was in it, but the love story and the lack of battle scenes remained. According to reviews it was about an American (Robert Harron) so eager to fight in the war that he enlisted in the Canadian army and was sent to England. There he fell in love with a nurse (Lillian Gish), but her father wanted her to marry another (Henry Walthall), who was secretly a German collaborator. The collaborator conveniently shot himself after he failed to lead bombers to a munitions factory, and the lovers were reunited. Kingsley knew that any early description might not resemble the finished film; she pointed out “trying to prognosticate what a new Griffith picture will be like, or when it will come, is like trying to date up an earthquake!”

Griffith directing, 1913

Audiences only had to wait four months. The Great Love premiered in Los Angeles on August 12th, and L.A. Times reviewer Antony Anderson thought it wasn’t quite as good as Hearts, but it was still Griffith and “when Griffith directs a photoplay his hand gives the touch of magic that forever sets the play as something apart and different from other picture plays.”

Marc Klaw

Kingsley reported that waiters were taking the new rules about alcohol very seriously. Marc Klaw, New York theater impresario was vacationing in town, and he complained to her:

“They not only want to tell you out here not only what to drink but when to drink it,” said Mr. Klaw, “and last night at 9 o’clock, in one of the local cafes, a large, strong waiter came and took my glass of wine away from me. When you stop telling people out here what to do and what not to do, and commence buying Liberty Bonds, I’ll believe your reformers are on the square.”

He was wrong about the Liberty Bonds: Westerners were buying lots of them. William S. Hart had just returned from a very successful two-week, nineteen city bond selling tour. He sold about 2 million dollars worth of them, and “Hart was fairly mobbed by his admirers, buttons being torn from his clothing and his red bandana handkerchief shredded to ribbons to be kept by the crowd as souvenirs.” But two ladies did their part to keep him humble. According to Kingsley:

He is the owner of a might fine bulldog, which insisted on going along. “I let him sit on my lap,” said Bill. “He is one of those big clumsy fellows about my size with a face that looks like the north end of a freight train going south. When we were crossing the street the traffic was blocked. There were two women standing near the car and one of the remarked ‘My, look at the face of that ugly brute.’ The dog’s face was only about six inches from mine, and to make it worse the other woman said ‘Which one?’”

William S. Hart and a bulldog from 1920 (not his bulldog). I can see a resemblance!

Hart also told her that Liberty Loan drives were very hard work. He said that after his tour, “any time I’m wanted to go to war, I’m ready.”

One hundred years ago this week, Grace Kingsley reported on the Western expansion of another group dedicated to doing their part for the war effort, Stage Women’s War Relief. She interviewed actress Louise Closser Hale, the vice-president and one of the original founders of the group in New York, who was in town to help establish the new branch. Kingsley wrote:

The motion-picture people of the West are responding splendidly, according to Mrs. Hale, to their opportunities for rendering noble aid to the stage men gone to war.

One of these projects, which sounds modest enough, is the workroom now being established in the Mason Operahouse Building; and if the Los Angeles branch approximates the work of similar service rooms in New York and other cities, its work will be of tremendous importance. The service room is a very democratic institution—all varieties of stage workers from stars to scrub women labor together for the common cause. No surgical bandages are made, but sewing, knitting and crocheting are done, all according to patterns furnished by other local war reliefs and every article made is turned over to the Red Cross and other relief agencies. No workers outside the profession are permitted to work here, however, no matter what their station or calling.

“One of our first beneficiaries,” said Mrs. Hale, “was a baby born after its father—a Fox director—was called away to war. We were very excited about it, and I am sure the youngster received about three times as many clothes as it needed.”

Louise Closser Hale

Olive White Farnum

Hale and Olive White Farnum were planning a big meeting at the Morosco Theater on Friday, April 26th to kick things off. In addition to the workroom, they wanted to launch a series of benefits and bazars, and the proceeds would go to stage and screen soldiers and their families.

The SWWR Western branch was a success. To raise money they did hold all-star benefit shows, as well as flag drives, garden fetes, and they even auctioned kisses from actresses at their show at the Hotel Alexandria. They also organized entertainment for sailors and soldiers; their first show was at the Submarine base in San Pedro on May 9th. In addition, they opened a tea room that was free for service members

The group held their last meeting where they began, at the Morosco Theater, on December 4th. There they decided to take a new name and purpose. Calling themselves the Players Welfare League, they decided to help stage people down on their luck. They immediately started planning fundraising. Unfortunately, interest in the group petered out, but in 1939 as World War 2 began, the government asked women from the New York branch to reactivate their group. They did, starting a new workroom, raising money, training speakers to sell war bonds and running Stage Door Canteens, which provided food and entertainment for service members. The group got a new name: The American Theater Wing. After the war they began giving grants to theater companies and educating people about live theater, but they’re best known for their annual awards, the Tonys and the Obies.

Kingsley’s favorite film this week was a “corking” comedy, Twenty-One, starring “that fascinating screen persona, Bryant Washburn.” He had a dual role: a tough prize-fighter and the mollycoddled youth who wants to be a prizefighter. As she pointed out, “naturally (in picturedom) he gets his chance.” The two change places, but the fighter likes the youth’s job so much that he refuses to change back. So the young man must not only fight in the ring, but he also has the beat up the fighter to get his own place back. She really enjoyed it: “the picture is done with sparkle and Washburn invests it with his usual delightfully unctuous humor.” It’s a lost film.

Kingsley reported on D.W. Griffith’s comeback success:

When Hearts of the World, Griffith’s latest film masterpiece, began its seventh week at Clune’s Auditorium last night, the audience numbered just twenty less than on the opening night. The film has broken all records at Clune’s Auditorium and has established new records for Griffith’s productions. The end of the run is not in sight.

The photos the New York Post Office doesn’t want you to see!

Kingsley told a story of excessive war rationing:

Again has Annette Kellerman been made to realize that a fine head of hair does not constitute a bathing suit in the eyes of the law. Photographs of Miss Kellerman in her latest Fox picture, Queen of the Sea, and nothing much else, caught the eye of the New York post office authorities, and she has been called upon to explain why she has Hooverized so painstakingly in the matter of bathing suits.

Now the lost film is remembered for being the first movie to be shot on panchromatic negative film, not for running into trouble with censors. However, I did learn that it’s still illegal to mail what the U.S. Postal Service considers lewd or filthy matter. According to their basic standards for mailing services/domestic mail manual, “obscene, lewd, lascivious, or filthy publications or writings, or mail containing information on where, how, or from whom such matter may be obtained, and matter that is otherwise mailable but that has on its wrapper or envelope any indecent, lewd, lascivious, or obscene writing or printing, and any mail containing any filthy, vile, or indecent thing is nonmailable (18 USC 1461, 1463).”

However, I suspect they don’t think Miss Kellerman is filthy, vile or indecent any more.

One hundred years ago this week, Theda Bara finished work on Salome and had a chat with Grace Kingsley. She was happy to be on her way to Arrowhead Springs for a week’s vacation with her sister. Her list of city vexations seems quaint now:

“In the city there are always so many things to do,” said Miss Bara, “but up in that wonderful mountain fastness* you simply can’t do anything if you want to. That is, you don’t make calls or see dressmakers or answer telephones, or tell the maid every morning about putting the canary out-of-doors. Yes, I think sister Loro and I may take some horseback rides up there, and we may walk a lot. We both enjoy walking away out in the country where nobody can see whether our khaki suits are dusty or not, and where we don’t have to stop and put a dull finish on our noses every few minutes.”

The star didn’t only want a change from her usual routine; she was tired of playing vamps. She said:

“The characters I have played which I have liked best are not vampires characters. I liked DuBarry and Cigarette in Under Two Flags best of anything I have done—that is outside of Salome. Salome was not naturally a vampire, it was merely circumstances made her so.”

The publicity department tried both good Bara…

…and bad Bara.

Luckily, her studio was going to let her “turn over a professional new leaf. Miss Bara’s next picture will be called Spanish Love…In it she will play a ‘good’ girl all the way through.” The film was eventually called Under the Yoke and while some of the posters sold it as a vamp film, she played a convent-educated woman living in the Philippines during the revolution who is rescued from an evil plantation owner by a dashing American captain. Unfortunately, playing a ‘good girl’ only lasted for one picture. Her next was When A Woman Sins and her character was back to driving men to their death. In a few years, audiences got tired of vamps, too, and she retired from acting.

Kingsley reported on a problem director Chet Withey was having with his nearly finished current film for D.W. Griffith, The Hun Within:

The trouble is, Withey admits, he doesn’t know how to wind the darn thing up. You see the story has a German spy as its villain, and according to the scenario, the mob should hang him—already, in point of fact, the well-known villain Charlie Gerrard has been hanged. But now that the government has signified its intention of making mob rule unpopular by drastic law measures, Chet has a villain on his hands with no spectacular way to dispose of him.

The law measure Kingsley is referring to is the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill introduced into the House of Representative in January, 1918. It would have made lynching a federal felony, taking its prosecution away from state and local authorities. It didn’t pass because Southern Democrats in the Senate filibustered it. They went on to prevent every single anti-lynching bill from being passed; in 2005 the Senate formally apologized for their failure to act.

Chet Withey decided showing the spy’s arrest was sufficient. The film had enough going on, with a kidnapping and a race to prevent a bomb from blowing up a ship.

Jewel Carmen and Charles Gorman in The Bride of Fear

Kingsley reviewed only one film this week, but she enjoyed it, writing “while a picture named The Bride of Fear might suggest its story is akin to such ‘mellers’ as The Poisoned Bathing Suit” it was actually “a clean-cut, sane, well acted and engaging little story.” The plot sounds awfully melodramatic now (a presumed dead criminal husband comes back to mar his wife’s happiness and she shoots him in self defense) but Kingsely said “the treatment is fresh and human, and there are a score of little touches in directing and ‘business’ which make the thing vivid and natural.” It was directed by Sidney Franklin, who until recently had been working on children’s movies with his brother Chester. He went on to be one of the top producers at MGM; his films included Mrs. Miniver (1942) and Random Harvest (1942).

*Fastness: a stronghold or fortress. Yes, I had to look it up. Furthermore, she’s quoting Wordsworth. Theda Bara was a clever woman.

One hundred years ago this week, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks had lunch with President Woodrow Wilson at the White House, and Charlie Murray (1) told Grace Kingsley all about it:

It was all very wonderful and very pleasant. The President asked Mary if she liked pictures and Mary said yes and did Mr. Wilson like being President. Then Douglas Fairbanks butted in and bet he could climb the side of the Capitol quicker than the President, and the President smiled and said yes, he guessed so…

Douglas declared he could leap the table quicker than the President and the President replied that he wasn’t doing much leaping—that he was standing solidly on his feet nowadays.(2)

Then the President told Mary he liked seeing her in pictures, and that she was a good little girl to buy so many Liberty Bonds.

At the time, was it rare for film actors to visit the White House but according to Wilson biographer A. Scott Berg, the President was a big fan of moving pictures. He’d hosted the first film screening at the White House, Birth of a Nation, in 1915, and private showings had become routine. (3) Movies and movie stars were becoming respectable.

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Beth Fairbanks

Owen Moore

However, less than a week later, a scandal involving Pickford and Fairbanks erupted in the papers that could have damaged that new respectability and ruined their careers. For reasons that their biographers could only speculate about, it didn’t. It began when Beth Fairbanks, angry because her husband called stories of their separation German propaganda designed to thwart his work for Liberty Bonds, went to the press and said she’d had enough. He needed to admit he was in love with another woman and that was what was causing their estrangement. The reporter said she named names, but the LA Times didn’t until the next day when Pickford’s husband Owen Moore made a statement from his new home at the Los Angeles Athletic Club: he’d been the last to hear the rumors and the last to believe them about Pickford and Fairbanks’ relationship, furthermore, in his opinion Fairbanks had been the aggressor and Pickford had been the victim.

After the initial flurry of articles, attention died down. Both actors returned to Los Angeles and went back to work, avoiding publicity for a bit. Fairbanks’ biographer Tracey Goessel theorized, “it is possible that Doug and Mary’s critical importance to the war’s fundraising activities resulted in subtle pressure on the part of the government to avoid the topic. That, or Charlotte Pickford’s abilities with a well-place bribe were underrated. Whatever the reason, the storm passed and Fairbanks was, evidently, as popular as ever.”

Pickford and Fairbanks arrive in England

Both stars got divorced, then married each other on March 28, 1920. Pickford’s biographer Eileen Whitfield said their fans high opinion saved them: “There was a rightness to Little Mary’s union with the magical Fairbanks.” Wherever they went, crowds gathered and cheered and they caused near-riots on their European honeymoon. They did a good job of managing the crisis.

Kingsley reviewed a notorious film this week, Men Who Have Made Love To Me:

Really now, isn’t it pathetic that a brilliant lady like Mary MacLane, who had always given us to understand that she was terribly intellectual and all that, should have stooped to so obvious an art as posing for a picture melodrama.

Based on a newspaper article MacLane had written a few years earlier, the film consisted of re-enactments of her six unhappy love affairs with all sorts of men, from a callow youth to a prize fighter (“the sort that almost any dame would have kept dark instead of putting in a picture”). Kingsley continued, “she says those love affairs were ‘damnably serious.’ To whom?” Between the stories MacLane smoked and chatted with her maid about the meaning of love. The film had been banned “in censor-ridden states like Ohio,” according to Kevin Brownlow. (8)

Unlike the censors, Kingsley didn’t care about Miss MacLane’s morals, she objected to her pretentiousness and self-centeredness – “the lady whose ‘I’s’ go by like telegraph poles in her essays.” The Women Film Pioneers Project has a biography of her; it opens with “Mary MacLane lived to shock her public.” It’s a lost film.

Kingsley offered an unusual suggestion in another review:

If you want to thoroughly enjoy what is in many respects the best picture the Rialto has had in many days, drop in about the beginning of the second reel and guess the first part. It will be easy to do so and you won’t be bored by some rather old and mawkish stuff.

Those Who Pay was the story of a love triangle, and Kingsley found it “very up-to-the-minute from a sociological standpoint,” because when the wife finds out what her husband had been up to, instead of getting into a fight, she meets with the young lady and they decide what to do. Unfortunately, they both don’t kick him to the curb — the wife keeps him. It’s a lost film.

(1) Charlie Murray was an actor working for Mack Sennett in 1918. He also did a lot of fundraising for Liberty Loans with Pickford and Fairbanks; that’s probably why he knew the story. A biography is on Silentology.